Still, while I can forgive bibdesk for needing additional scripts to work smoothly, I can’t forgive Papers for this. Actually It’s attached to a folder action and my latex template just include path to a single file containing complete library, so that’s not a major issue. Most of my references come from ADS, so when I export bibtex from papers I run a small python script to fetch bibtex records from ADS. As it often happens, bibdesk is a tool and paper is a “solution”ģ)Sadly enough, bibtex export in papers is crap: it exports lots of non required fields+is not nice to complicated surnames (i.e. Basically the main problem is that for every action (adding/reading/annotating etc) one needs several steps (or apple-script). It’s supposed to manage references and that’s what it does. I’m papers user, so here are my comments:ġ)I like bibdesk very much: It’s free, fast and does more or less the same as papers.Ģ)While 1st is true, bibdesk is not nearly as good as papers for managing papers. (Updated Nov 2, 2009: Thanks to Marshall for pointing out this functionality that I had overlooked.)Īlso consider Mendeley, which is both a desktop and online article organizer.Īlright, there’s by BibDesk biased view, let’s hear from the Paper’s lovers in the comments. BibDesk is great for browsing notes or annotations, but not for reading the original papers. Papers even has an iPhone app ($10) which enables you to sync a Smart Collection so that the PDFs are at your fingertips when you have some dead time for reading. Reading Papers: Papers Papers is great for using as a browser to read PDFs. Papers costs $42 for non-students, $26 for students. Cost: Bibdesk Bibdesk is free and open source. The most recent update to BibDesk (1.3.22) helped a little, but it’s still not as clean as Papers even though they both use the same 3-column layout. Slick UI: Papers You gotta admit, Papers sure is pretty while BibDesk leaves something to be desired. And then I just add a sequential number to the cite key for the autonaming and autofiling of the associated PDFs. I’m partial to first author + two digit year (Custom format string:%a1%y). BibDesk autogenerates cite keys based on a user-defined format. To be honest, I’m not quite sure how Papers assigns cite keys to new articles. Again, a full discussion of BibTeX is left for another day, but suffice it to say, being able to assign memorable cite keys to articles is important. Cite Keys: BibDesk BibTex + AstroNat is what you should be using to include references in LaTeX articles prepared with AASTeX. Getting this functionality built into BibDesk would rock. Looks like this ADS to BibDesk app is on the right track, but it only works with Safari, not Firefox. BibDesk does have a Papers-like single-click import for articles on, but not for ADS. The way I do it is browse to the article’s ADS entry, scroll down, clink on “Bibtex entry for this abstract”, highlight the bibtex, switch to BibDesk, use alt-command-L to add a new publication from the clipboard. Search and Import: Papers Papers auto-magically imports articles and metadata and downloads the PDF while importing an article into BibDesk is (usually) a multistep process. Preview is a can of worms that I choose to leave for another day.) Improved annotation functionality and integration with Skim is likely for future versions of Papers. PDF Annotations: Bibdesk + Skim Annotations added in the PDF reader app Skim show up as Notes in BibDesk so you don’t even have to open the PDF to see the text you’ve highlighted or underlined. This ability to easily tag articles with multiple keywords and then search based on them is a huge advantage of BibDesk over Papers but I think Papers will catch up soon. With BibDesk I can highlight multiple articles and quickly specify if I only want articles with ALL of those keywords, or papers with ANY of the selected keywords. Keywords/Tags: Bibdesk Keywords play a starring role in BibDesk, occupying the left column in the main page while in Papers they are hidden in Notes. Below, I’ve listed the main functionalities, in rough order of importance to me, and which application I think handles them best. Papers gurus, I’m counting on you to speak up in the comments if I’ve missed something. BibDesk does most of those things while, as far as I can tell, Papers really only excels at searching and importing. I want my app to be as one-stop shopping as possible: I want to be able to search, import, organize, assign BibTeX cite keys, and annotate all in one place. There are different things to look for in an article management tool. This topic has been discussed elsewhere and is sure to be visited many times in the future on AstroBetter, so consider this post just one part of a much bigger discussion. Since I don’t actually use Papers, this post is more of a listing of my reasons for sticking with BibDesk for the time being. Folks have been clamoring for a Papers vs.
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